From PowerPoint to Canva
A story of stupidity, lethargy, and enlightenment
Since time immemorial, I’ve used PowerPoint for my visual design work.
Actually, that’s a lie. I started with Adobe Photoshop which I learned in high school, before regressing to PowerPoint when I lost my Photoshop software during one of my laptop upgrades yonks ago.
Not having any formal design training, I usually design on the fly and mostly let the software dictate my direction with complete disregard for any foundational design principles.1
And these are (some of) what I’ve produced over the years:
When I sat down to start this Substack newsletter, I immediately went to my old friend Mr. PowerPoint for my logo needs, and created this:
I thought it looked good at the time, and so I used it on my website and Instagram. I didn’t even mind that the rectangular logo got clumsily cut off by Instagram’s round profile image frame.2
I even used PowerPoint for all my Instagram posts. I kept a PowerPoint presentation template which I fittingly named “Design drafts,” and with each post, I simply changed the copy and used Windows’ Snipping Tool3 to cut out the frame for Instagram.
Of course, this resulted in a number of outcomes:
Low-quality images
A lot of snipping for carousels4
Snippets with unequal borders, i.e. this…
All this while I’ve been working on Canva for months doing design work for my boss’ social media…
For those of you who don’t know Canva, it’s great. It’s easy to use, brimming with cool images and fonts, formatted for various social media platforms, and free.
Yep, I’ve got this cool free tool that I could use to do all my design work, a tool that’s actually designed for design work, a tool that I was using every week for work. Yet I persisted with PowerPoint and continued to furiously snip away for my newsletter needs.
This situation continued for months. I literally didn’t once think that I could use Canva for my personal design work, that it would make my design look better and my life easier.
As I write this, I still genuinely do not know why it didn’t cross my mind earlier to switch from PowerPoint to Canva. But thankfully I did switch, not that long ago.5
After some initial time investment transporting my design over to Canva, matching the colours and finding the right fonts, I’ve now fully migrated. And one of the first things I did?
From now on, no more snipping, no more frustration at seeing uneven lines on my Instagram page, just a lingering shame that it took me so long to see the light.6
I’m not actually sure what the whole point of this post was. Switching from PowerPoint to Canva was a momentous step forward for my newsletter, so I wanted to write about it.
I guess what you’re getting out of this is a cool new design tool if you weren’t aware of it already. And if you were aware of it already, then an important life-changing lesson:
Don’t be like me. Period.
What software do you use for your design work? Are you a fellow Canva enthusiast? Did you even know PowerPoint templates could be this cool?
Leave a comment, send the most beautiful thing you’ve ever designed for me to gawk at and realise the inadequacy of my being, share this with a friend who’s forgotten how to use Photoshop.
Until next Friday… Stay cool, stay safe, stay thoughtful,
Val
Not because I’m above the rules, but because I don’t actually know what any of them are.
I shake my fist at my former self and hide under my bed in shame.
The best thing since sliced bread, which doesn’t slice bread but maybe can snip bread?
Social media speak for posts with multiple frames
More shame.
I’m not actually serious about all this shame business by the way. I’m more amused than anything at this whole episode. Please don’t send the cavalry.
The first experience I had with Canva is a colleague who decided to use it to create something for internal use, unaware that we had a really decent Adobe tool (InDesign) that was already formatted and had templates for internal use. Her result looked superficially good but had a lot of internal inconsistencies in the design. I like that it Canva is another tool that makes design accessible to people; then the next step is helping people strengthen their design skills.